Marilyn Z. Tomlins

Die in Paris

A spring night in Paris. Suddenly the night's stillness is shattered by sirens and excited voices. For days foul smoke has been pouring from the chimney of an uninhabited house close to the Avenue des Champs-Elysées. Police and fire fighters race to the house to break down the bolted door. They make a spine-chilling discovery. The remains of countless human beings are being incinerated in a furnace in the basement. In a pit in an outhouse quicklime consumes still more bodies. Neighbors say they hear banging, pleading, sobbing and cries for help come from inside the house deep at night. They say a shabbily-dressed man on a green bike pulling a cart behind him comes to the house, always at dawn, or dusk.

The house belongs to Dr. Marcel Petiot - a good-looking, charming, caring, family physician who lives elsewhere in the city with his wife and teenage son. Is he the shabbily-dressed man on the green bike? If so, what has he to say about the bodies?

Marilyn Z.Tomlins is a freelance journalist. She lives and works in Paris, France.

The bits about sticking your tongue up your right nostril (and other similar things)…

And, if sticking your tongue up your right nostril sounds like a whole load of fun, why not check out this milk machine at the local supermarket.

Now, I wonder how many people have just clicked on that link and of those, how many first attempted to stick their tongue up their right nostrils?

Happily, Beth proves that she’ll probably not be considered for the Mom of the Year award, having taken 4 teenagers (2 of them not her own!) to a totally unsuitable film!

That’s rather comforting as I guess that the sort of person who wins Mom of the Year awards probably keeps a very boring blog?

And boring, Beth’s blog certainly isn’t!

Especially when she gets to talk about eating un rôti de petit poulain.(Or, Roast small foal, if you’d prefer it in English. And that’s Roast Baby Horsey for those of you who are desperately trying to evade the whole eating Black Beauty’s little sister aspects of the post!)

But do we have to watch out for Cake Baking posts?

Yes, I do have to warn you that there are a few Cake Baking posts – I think it might be an occupational hazard if you have four children!

Unless, of course, you do as my parents did when they convinced me and my six brothers and sisters that we had all been born on February 29th – and then lied to us about the rules for leap years (it took me years to believe that leap years didn’t come round once every 100 years or so!)

There might be a few more Cake Baking posts scattered around but I was so blown away with the cat litter tray one that I decided to stop right there (finding a Turkish Toilet shaped birthday cake would probably cause me deep and irredeemable psychic damage!)

Stuff that doesn’t have to do with eating Black Beauty, Baking Cakes or sticking your tongue up your nostril….

There’s plenty of stuff about moving to the French Alps from West Africa, for example.

I bet no one has ever said to Beth… “Well, that must have been a big change for you.”

Or maybe they have because Beth seems to have all the answers – and the right answer isn’t the obvious one… “No, actually France is just like West Africa. Except for the cheese. You guys have way more cheese here. But other than that, life is exactly the same. Yup. Amazing but true.”